Simon Willison’s Weblog

Django snippets: Authenticate against Active Directory. Uses a custom authentication backend with the Python ldap module. If Django hasn’t seen the user before a new Django user account is created with data from ldap.

# 8:40 am / activedirectory, authentication, django, ldap, python

Updates to template_utils. James Bennett’s Django template_utils library now provides tags for consuming external RSS and Atom feeds. Combine with template fragment caching for an instant mashup written just using templates.

# 3:25 pm / atom, django, feeds, james-bennett, python, rss, templateutils, universalfeedparser

ErlyWeb vs. Ruby on Rails EC2 Performance Showdown. ErlyWeb’s peak response rate beats Rails by 47x, albeit with a hugely simplified benchmark. More interesting than the results is the idea of using EC2 for benchmarking on identical simulated hardware.

# 3:27 pm / amazon, benchmarks, ec2, erlang, erlyweb, performance, rails, virtualisation, yarivsadan

Shadowmaker. Upload a PNG with a transparent background and get back a shadow image suitable for use with the Google Maps API.

# 3:45 pm / google-maps, google-maps-api, png, shadowmaker